Freud's theory of the drives as critical impulse in Adorno's aesthetic thought

The aim of this study is to analyse the aesthetic thought of Theodor W. Adorno with reference to two distinct systems of thought, first, the idealist aesthetics of Kant, and second, Freud's theory of the drives. Adorno is shown to posit a dualism that divides aesthetic experience into two opposing modes, which could be termed the aesthetic of identity and the aesthetic of negativity, and this dual aesthetic has significant parallels in both the Kantian and the Freudian systems. The study concludes that, while Adorno devotes a great deal of overt attention to Kant's (idealist) conception of the artwork in his construction of a dual aesthetic, and while many of Adorno's arguments display a deep affinity with German idealism, Adorno's aesthetic thought is nevertheless informed by Freud's theory of the drives, resulting in an understanding of the artwork that emphasises its material and sensuous aspects.;Chapter 1 argues that there is an epistemological parallel between Adorno's distinction between the aesthetic of identity and the aesthetic of negativity and Kant's distinction between the determinant judgement and the reflective aesthetic judgement of taste. This analogy, however, is a limited one, and in Chapter 2, it is argued that a more satisfactory paradigm for Adorno's dual aesthetic can be found in Freud's theory of the drives. Whereas the aesthetic of identity can be explained in terms of drive that is distorted or diverted by repression, repetition compulsion, fetishism, narcissism, masochism, aggression, cathexis on past objects (archaic attachments), and a consequent generalised ego weakness, the aesthetic of negativity relies on a specific variety of sublimation that Adorno terms “spiritualisation,” whereby the energy of the libidinal drive that gives rise to the artistic impulse is preserved. Chapter 3 examines the ways in which Adorno's dual aesthetic manifests itself in artistic and cultural phenomena. After demonstrating the parallels between Marcuse's affirmative culture, with its principal category of repressive desublimation, and Adorno's identitarian culture industry, with its principal category of false pleasure, the study concludes with an analysis of how Adorno's aesthetic of negativity is instantiated in the authentic artworks of European Modernism, particularly those of Kafka.